


Lorsque

by QuincyJones



Category: Starfighter (Comic)
Genre: Angst, Cain is SO GODDAMN ANGRY WHY, Cain never enlists, Creepy ass house, Deimos is small and adorable, Dust Bunny of Doom, Ghost Deimos, Heavy Angst, I don't know how blast furnaces work, In Sickness and in Hell, M/M, Notice me Xena fans :3, Pianos, Reading Fairy Tales, Swearing, This author has little to no sleep schedule, What even is my paragraph spacing anymore, Whoops Cain is nice now, haunted house au, i'm in too deep, mafia?, this was a mistake
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2018-10-19 03:28:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 8,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10631190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuincyJones/pseuds/QuincyJones
Summary: Sacha, your typical Martian colonist with no hopes or dreams of which to speak, is forced to flee the settlement when he witnesses the murder of a man he doesn't know by a powerful criminal organization. Out on the streets and moving around every day to avoid being caught, he thinks it's a godsend when he finds an old abandoned mansion beyond the edge of town to winter in.After staying in it for a bit, he isn't so sure everything in the house is what it seems.





	1. Black Sheep Aren't Fed

Two months.

  
Two fucking months of running away, of hiding in broken-ass shacks, crawling under slimy rocks and hoping they’d pass him by.

  
Every time Sacha found a place, a safe house, somewhere he thought they couldn’t find him, they turned up at his door, tasers and electric batons (and occasionally the odd illegal rifle or two) fired up and at the ready. And every single time, Sacha barely got away with his skin intact, bolting out the back door with no time to take even the most basic of provisions with him.

  
He muttered a few quiet curses in Russian, then muttered some more, angry that they had to be quiet, angry that he had to be so goddamn quiet.

  
What was it gonna take for these bastards to leave him the fuck alone?

  
The streets were quiet, and the night was cold. Sacha shivered in his threadbare jacket. The red sands of Mars swirled around his feet. Even here, in one of the nicer cities, it permeated the air, choking the artificial grass and staining everything the color of rust. It was like one of those dyes in that Holi festival on Earth Sacha had once seen a documentary of.

  
He was glad he wasn’t wearing white.

  
No one wore white in the colonies. No one could afford it. It was grey, cheap, ragged loose tunics and baggy pants for them, chafing against their children’s skin, little protection against the biting winds and bitter chill. Leftover cloth from Earth. Recycled. Reused. None of the good things for them, wayward children of Mars.

  
This would never be happening to him on Earth, Sacha thought bitterly. Bitter, like the food, like the water, like the weather, like the people, like everything on this godforsaken planet. Oh, no. Never on Earth. On Earth, the police actually did their jobs instead of abusing their power to drink and smoke and confiscate your items and fuck your sisters (or brothers, whatever they wanted). On Earth, Sacha would’ve been put into a nice little witness protection program, in a nice little house in a nice little suburb with water that didn’t taste like filtered bile. On Earth, there never would’ve been a murder happening right in front of him at all.

  
Fucking politicians, sending everyone they didn’t like, everyone that had a goddamn sense of independency off into space, to live out cursed lives on this accursed planet, to die and leave a legacy of anger and not-enough-everything onto their progenity. All so they could have that beautiful blue planet to themselves.

  
There was never enough of anything here. Not enough food, water, love… These things were all for the stupid sheep on Earth, following their politicians blindly, living in pretty glass houses on a pretty blue world that none of them fucking deserved.

  
Sacha was tired, so tired of running, tired of scavenging in trash bins for meager bites he called ‘dinner’, tired of sleeping with one eye open just in case they found him somehow. Tired of worrying about his sister, left at home with a boyfriend that was less than loving-kind to fend for herself.

  
He sank down against the grimy wall, surrounded by the stench of the trash heap, and fell into exhausted sleep. He did not dream. 


	2. An Exercise in Misery

Sacha woke up and felt like absolute shit.

  
His mouth was dry, the sour taste of whatever he’d eaten last night disgusting on the back of his tongue. There was no water to wash it out with, no water to soothe his chapped lips and raw throat. It would taste bitter anyways.

  
Groaning, Sacha drew a hand across his mouth, wiping away the drool. He sniffed, and abruptly sneezed.

  
Shit.

  
He couldn’t afford to get sick.

  
Sacha stood on stiff, aching legs, pushing himself harder than he thought he could. He was still tired, still exhausted, even after what could be considered a good night’s sleep for him nowadays. He could already feel the creeping onset of a cold, and with the temperatures as low as they were while winter approached his side of Mars, it would likely be much worse.

  
He had to find shelter. He had to find a secure place to stay and wait out the cold, or he would die in it, another body lost beneath the snow to be discovered come spring. Another unmarked grave, not even a piece of scrap iron placed at his head to commemorate his existence.

Sacha couldn’t really be angry at that one. What had he ever done worth remembering?

  
At this point, it would probably just be easier, probably be better to let them catch up with him. At least he could live his last few days in relative comfort.

  
No, Sacha told himself. No. I’m a survivor. I won’t let these bastards be the thing that finally takes me down.

  
So he soldiered on, forcing his feet to move forwards, shivering and hissing through his teeth in the cold wind. His fingers hurt. His toes and the bottoms of his feet hurt, not even wearing proper shoes, just more of that awful grey fabric wrapped around them as tight as Sacha could get it.

  
It was still dark outside, and the streets were quiet. The red sands looked dark grey under the weak starlight. Everyone was tucked up in their ramshackle houses, huddled under grey fabric blankets, thin and worn. Sacha would give anything to be in their place.

  
He had to keep moving. He had to find somewhere to stay for the winter.

  
_I should have been stockpiling food,_ he thought to himself. He’d need non-perishables to get through the winter, holed up like he intended to be. But the snows were still a few weeks away. If he could only find a safehouse to hide in, he could spend the rest of the time he had stealing canned goods and clean water. One only drank the snowmelts on Mars if one had a death wish.

  
He kept on stumbling through the alleyway, delirious and dehydrated. _I’ve got to find a place._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	3. Rest for the Wicked

There weren’t any abandoned buildings in these slums that kept the chill out well enough. Sacha almost felt like a fucking real estate agent, looking through all the sad piles of wood colonists called ‘houses’. 

Come midday, he stole a bottle of water out of someone’s plumbing on the nicer side of town, then stole some of their bottles and stole some more water, and ended up sucking the dick of their next door neighbor so the police officer whose house he’d broken into wouldn’t be told about it. He promptly broke back into the officer’s house to use his plumbing to thoroughly wash out his mouth, and stole a coat made out of two layers of shabby grey cloth stuffed with… Bubble wrap? 

It was warmer than what he had. Sacha refused to give any fucks beyond that.

Now he was really starting to feel sick, and what was worse, he’d left a trail. Whatever place he holed up in had to be far, far away from here. 

Late afternoon came. Sacha found himself in an old, technically abandoned part of the slums, head wrapped in what had been his jacket to prevent anybody catching a good look at his distinctive face and hair. He’d always had sharp features. It made him desirable, which meant sex money, but it also made him recognizable.  
He wished he’d had time to take a shower earlier. It would’ve made him feel more like a fucking human being again, instead of this sad, grime-covered creature living in pinched clothes.

These slums were even filthiest than the one he'd been in. Human waste littered the side of the street and choked the air with its stench. People huddled further back against the walls, wrapped in as many layers of torn, dirty fabric as they could get. Every single one of them looked out with dead eyes, the knowledge that winter was soon to arrive etched into their grim, hopeless faces. 

Before, Sacha had always been glad not to be one of them. Now, he couldn't be sure he wasn't. 

A girl appeared in his path, opening her shirt to show him her tits. Sachs shoved her roughly aside and kept walking. He wasn't interested. Besides, he didn't have the money, either. 

That was also new. Sacha used to always have money. Whether it was the endless blowjobs, or doing odd jobs for the richer schmucks in town, or sneaking into babushka’s room to lift a few coins… he always had something on him. 

Those days were gone. All he had on him now was the water he'd stolen.

Fuck, he'd really been hitting a new low. 

He walked out of the rotting buildings, and came to the edge of town. A barbed-wire fence ran around its perimeter. For safety, they said, when Sacha knew all it really was was a way to lock them in. 

But out there, behind the fence, planted in the ground amongst the shifting sands…

“Fuck,” Sacha breathed. “That's what I'm looking for.”

There was a house out there, enormous, made out of stone. Only one of the windows he could see was broken. Other than that, it was completely intact. Better yet, it was beyond the limits of the town. No one would have the balls to go out there. And during the winter, it would be easy to keep one of the rooms warm.   
It looked like one of those houses an Earth politician built for themselves, in case they ever wanted to come visit the colonies. They never did, and so it sat there, abandoned, left alone in the shifting sands. 

It was absolutely perfect for holeing up in. 

Sacha clambered up over the barbed-wire fence, wincing as he scraped his elbows on the dismount. It was the water’s fault. It weighed him down. He hopped down off the fence and took a moment to look back. 

The settlement was massive. The bustle of the steel factory could be heard faintly in the background. If Sacha’s life hadn't gotten so screwed up, he would be working there, shoveling iron ore into a blast furnace. It was a great place to work. The hazards were low, and the heat never went out during the winter. It was a fucking blast furnace; that shit never got turned off. 

Sacha took one last, long look at the town he'd been born in, the town no one thought he would ever leave, the town he was expected to die in. Then he turned around walked to the house.


	4. The House

It was even bigger up close.

Sacha’s face twisted in a wry, humorless smile, thinking of all the other times he'd thought that. The expression had too much teeth.

  
The house was a fucking mansion. A goddamn cobblestone path led up to a fucking porch, partially covered in red sand. The door was a double-door: ornate, wooden, like nothing you'd ever find anywhere else on Mars.

  
It was also locked, but that was okay. Sacha had picks.

  
A few fumbling tries with fingers frozen stiff, and the doors were thrown open and then shut and locked again. Sacha tossed down his water in the entryway and looked for something to bar the entrance with. He'd already relocked the doors, of course, but he’d only be satisfied with the safety of this place if he couldn't break into it.

  
Looking around, he could see a coat rack and a dresser in what was sort of a miniature foyer. To the right, a set of stairs led upwards. Directly ahead there was a living room, an old piano sitting in one corner. The couch seemed to be on a lower level than the piano.

  
Sacha moved the dresser to block the door, grunting with the effort, and moved on to inspect the living room.

  
He'd been correct. The couch was on a lower level than the piano.  
Coming in from the foyer placed him face-to-face with glass doors to a large patio that overlooked the Martian cliffs behind the house. To his left, on the far side of the living room, was a fireplace set into one wall. A rectangular section of the floor was lower than the rest of it, a step leading down to it. A dusty couch that was otherwise in very good condition was arranged in what Sacha supposed Earth-people thought was a tasteful configuration in tandem with a smaller, two-person couch and a coffee table. The piano was on the raised part of the floor, nestled up against the wall Sacha faced.

  
To Sacha’s right was a kitchen. A singular island counter with stove tops on one side dominated the space, with smaller counters lining the walls. A sink lay in one corner, above which was a window. A refrigerator sat beside the sink. Cabinets lined the wall, hanging over the counters.  
He looked up. The railings of the upstairs hallway peeked out at him, but what really dominated the scene was the massive fucking crystal chandelier these rich fucks hung from their ceiling.

  
“Goddamn,” Sacha whistled. “How rich do you have to be to get something like that?”

  
No answer came. Good thing, too. Sacha would have run the fuck out of there if anything, disembodied voice or no, appeared to answer him.  
He stopped thinking about disembodied voices before he creeped himself out, turned around, and went upstairs.

  
The floor was structurally sound. Sacha climbed up the stairs and turned left. This brought him to the upstairs hallway he'd seen earlier. From here, he could see the piano in the living room and the glass doors to the patio, as well as the refrigerator and sink in the kitchen. He took a moment to shake his head at the massive fucking chandelier he could see the top of now. It was even more elaborate than he'd thought.

  
The hallway came to an end at a set of cabinets built into the wall. Two doors lay on either side. To the left was a bathroom. Sacha went inside and found, to his surprise, a sink that actually worked. The bathtub was huge and made of this strange green-black material, hard and cold like stone, but smooth, sort of like metal but not as cold. The shower was separate from it, a square-walled area with the top of the showerhead just barely showing above one wall. He opened the door to it and stuck his head in, shaking it at the overcomplicated controls.

  
“Why the hell did these people make everything so fancy if they knew they weren't gonna use it?” Sacha asked himself.

  
Again, thankfully, nobody answered him. He continued on his way into the bedroom and was promptly blinded by its opulence.  
The bed was enormous, set on a

raised dais, covered with a canopy. The spread was blue, the sheets were black, and the curtains were a rich royal velvet silver. It was so different from the ceaseless grey of colonial cloth, even though it was nearly the same color. Sacha gaped at it for a moment before remembering to be surly and unimpressed.

  
The rest of the room was no less richly furnished. The window was huge, floor-to-ceiling, spanning the entire length of one wall. The same silvery curtains hung over it as the bed. A large mirror was bolted to the wall across from the bed, and beside it lay two wardrobes and a vanity. One of the wardrobes had a lady’s wig hung on its doorknob, left to gather dust along with the rest of the house. Sacha surmised that that wardrobe held her things and decided not to go poking through it, at least not until he felt the need for some pocket change.

  
It was late. He was tired, and Sacha was already starting to feel his nose stuff up from whatever virus he'd contracted. He dusted the bed off as much as he was able, peeled back the sheets, and curled up on the soft mattress.

  
In his dreams, a piano began to play. 


	5. Fever Songs

The sun shone down on Sacha’s face, glowing through his eyelids. He blinked and rolled over onto his back, trying to get his bearings.

  
Yesterday flooded back into his conscious mind before he had the chance to panic over the unfamiliar location. The thin beam of light let in through the crack in the curtains glittered off the mirrors in the room and set the silvery fabrics sparkling. Dust winked in and out of existence in the golden ray of illumination.

  
Sacha pushed himself up off the mattress and groaned, hand flying up to his forehead. The skin beneath his palm was feverishly hot and clammy. The rest of his head was sore and aching, and he couldn’t breathe through his nose.

  
That wasn’t a good sign.

  
Muttering a string of curses, he got out of bed and downed a bottle of water. It made him feel slightly better, which was good, because he needed to do something about food.   
He dragged himself downstairs to have a look at the kitchen.

  
The plumbing wasn’t the only thing that inexplicably still ran. The refrigerator was cold, and in it, Sacha found a few bottles of expensive earth beer along with some peanut butter and crackers. Why the hell were there crackers in the refrigerator? The peanut butter he could understand; Babushka sometimes put their nut butter supplement in the refrigerator. But crackers? The fuck?

  
In the freezer, he found about a month’s worth of frozen meat in nice, individually wrapped packets. Sacha was no health official, but it looked good to him. If he rationed it, the food here could probably get him through the winter, as long as the power didn’t go out before the snows rolled in. Once the weather turned sour, even if the power went out, the ice outside could serve as refrigeration. He’d done it enough at home to know.

  
Just to be safe, he looked through the upper cabinets, and found several bottles of Essential Nutrient Supplement Powder beside a rack of dishes. Fuck yes. Now he wouldn’t have to worry about getting scurvy. Or having to eat off the floor.

  
The kitchen drawers had knives and cutlery, as well as a few other tools he couldn’t determine a use for. The lower cabinets had pots, pans, and what he guessed was a coffee grinder. Sadly, there was no coffee. The stove turned on just fine.

  
Sacha gathered up some crackers and peanut butter and collapsed on one of the couches to have breakfast. He wolfed his food and was halfway to dreamland before he realized he was humming the melody he’d dreamed last night.

  
He kept humming, hoping it would spark his memory and remind him of where he’d heard that song before. It didn’t. But the melody was simple and clean, so it could very well have been an old nursery tune, lost in his subconscious.

  
At any rate, it was a good song. Sacha liked it well enough. He thought about putting lyrics to it, but laughed, because he didn’t know the first thing about music and wasn’t creative enough to make up for it.

  
Still, he wished somebody would. It was a nice song.

  
He lay down to sleep, and when he woke up again, ‘shit’ didn’t accurately describe how he felt. It was something more severe, like ‘the smear left behind when somebody scrapes shit off the side of a toilet’. His nose was still stuffed up, but now his throat was sore, and his head felt like his brain was expanding inside of it, like now there wasn’t enough space in his skull for it.

  
He groaned up at the ceiling and clapped a hand onto his forehead. It burned hotter than it had before, still clammier than bog air.

  
Sacha would like to visit a bog someday, get away from the eternal desert on Mars. He took these wishful thoughts he’d curbed long ago as evidence that he was, in fact, running a high enough fever to be actually delirious.

  
Sleep. Sleep was the way to fix this. He curled back up on the couch and sank into muddled fever dreams.

  
In his dreams, the piano began to play. It was louder this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, everybody!
> 
> Fun fact: this entire story was introduced to me in the form of a dream I had the night before I posted the first chapter. It's not very long, and the plot's pretty linear, but I thought it was a simple yet beautiful story to share. I hope my writing does it justice.


	6. Caretaker

Sacha spent the next few days in perpetual misery, barely able to peel himself off the couch for food and water. Eventually he managed to drag himself up the stairs to have a bath, and realized his mistake after he crashed on the bed and couldn’t muster up the energy to go back downstairs for sustenance.

  
The best he could manage was desperate gulps of tap water during intermittent runs to the bathroom. Afterwards, he’d curl up on the mattress, shivering and shaking and bent over trying to close up the gaping hole his stomach had somehow morphed into. Water filled it for a little bit, hollow and gurgly, but it wasn’t the same as food, and he always went back to being hungry.

  
Some time later he stopped feeling it. Sacha couldn’t keep track of time, which worried him, because he didn’t know if it was two weeks or three weeks without any sustenance that would kill him, and he wouldn’t know when those days arrived, either.

  
Maybe he was going to die here, on this bed, another casualty of the colonies. He’d rot here, no grave or marker to send him to rest.

  
Time wore on. Sacha’s mind ceased to function correctly as the fever took control of his senses. He felt fuzzy and uncertain, mouth thick and cottony as even a trip across the hallway to the bathroom became something he couldn’t do. But one hazy, scorching morning, cool water splashed across his face, trickled into his mouth, and Sacha’s tongue licked his lips of its own accord, desperately seeking out those precious droplets of cold heaven.

  
A small trickle of the water poured into his mouth. Sacha tried to gulp it down, but there wasn’t enough, so he was left whining pitifully as he drank what he was given. Several times the stream let up, and each time it did he nearly cried, but it always came back.

  
Eventually, he began to feel less and less dehydrated, until it felt like he didn’t need water anymore. He closed his mouth. The trickle continued for just a second longer until whoever was pouring it caught on and let up. Sacha tried to force his eyes open to see who it was, but all he could see were the silvery-gray curtains and a small strip of moonlight that poured out from their seam.

  
Was he hallucinating it all? Sacha wouldn’t put it past his sick-addled brain. But he didn’t feel thirsty anymore. His last thought before he sank into sleep was at least he would die sated.

  
He didn’t die. He woke up again, in the hours before dawn, and was given more water. This time he didn’t even think to see who it was. The same person pressed a cracker to his no-longer-dry mouth, and he ate it, even though he felt queasy afterwards. They didn’t try to feed him another one. Sacha sank back into sleep again, and when he woke, the cycle repeated.

  
One morning he woke up feeling considerably less like he was wreathed in burning hellfire, so he blinked open his eyes. He realized he was sweating when some of it bypassed his eyelashes and ran onto his sclera. Pain. Searing pain. Blinking violently to clear the salt sting from his ocular units, Sacha was suddenly visually assaulted by the best thing he’d ever seen.

  
A soft, pale blue light hovered over him. It was a curious sort of light. It almost looked like a hologram, but less harsh, and there was no projector Sacha could see. Two delicate, fine-boned hands peeked out from the central mass of muted luminescence. One held a pitcher of cool water; the other, a rag. As he lay on his back, staring in awe at the light, pain forgotten, the creature gently dabbed at his forehead with the rag. It was cool heaven.

  
“Who…?” Sacha asked. Meant to ask. The dryness of his throat mangled his voice into a barely heard croak. The creature took no notice, and instead propped his head up with one hand and brought the pitcher down to his mouth with the other. Fingers stroked reassuringly through his thick black hair in little minute movements, tipping his head forward so he could close his lips around the cool metal of the pitcher. Water trickled into his mouth, cold and perfect, clearing away the sourness above his tongue.

  
When he had his fill of the water, the light creature put the pitcher back down on the table, and held a cracker up to his mouth. Thus, he was enticed to eat a small bowl of peanut-butter crackers. The creature helped him drink from the pitcher in between each one, and by the end of it he was strong enough to hold it himself, greedily swallowing great mouthfuls of the water. It soothed his burning body and softened his cracked lips.

  
Sleep crept up on him like a cat upon an unsuspecting mouse, quiet and nearly unnoticeable until he arrived at the threshold of the dreaming world. Sacha didn’t want to fall asleep yet. He’d spent the last few days in delirium and unconsciousness, under the gentle care of this strange being, that began to float away now, sensing his descent into dreams. Sacha wasn’t done with it yet. He wanted to know what it was, and why it was helping him.

  
He stretched out a hand and caught the tips of those graceful fingers. Instantly, the being began to shudder, its entire essence fluctuating wildly. Sacha was terrified. What had he done? Had he inadvertently destroyed it? The creature kept shaking, shivering, tremors running up Sacha’s arm from where he gripped those fingers tight, not knowing if he should let go or hold on, not knowing if there was still hope for recovery or if the damage was already done.

  
It seemed to be the latter, because the creature tipped its head back and screamed a terrible scream, and Sacha had to let go of it to clap his hands around his ears and wince. Then the sound stopped, and he looked anxiously towards the creature, only to find it changed.

  
Where there had been an ethereal thing of pale, muted light, now there was a boy, not so much younger than Sacha, who was about to turn nineteen (if he remembered correctly). He was short and slight, telltale signs of malnutrition in his sunken face and knobbly joints. Black hair fell over one of his eyes. The other was stark blue, blown wide in fear.

  
“Wait,” Sacha called, reaching out. The boy whipped around and bolted out of the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAAAAH
> 
> First of all, thank you all so much for reading this! I'm having a crap ton of fun with this AU, and I know my writing's not the best, but I hope I'm doing at least an entertaining job. 
> 
> Second of all, HUGE thank-you to everybody who left kudos! My heart literally bursts with joy every time I get one of them, and recently (y'all can scroll down and see) I GOT A KUDO FROM AN ARCHIVE USER! I know, I know. Nothin' special. There are hundreds of them out there. But this particular archive user happens to be one of my FAVORITE authors on here EVER, who has written absolutely the most amazing Deimos/Praxis fics. I fell so hard in love with the way they developed Deimos as a character, and I absolutely ADORE their writing style, and getting a kudo from them is basically like having Senpai notice me. I had a miniature heart attack and ran around screaming in pure joy. Thank you so much, http://archiveofourown.org/users/on_the_wing ! I love your work, and I am so totally unworthy of your attention and aaaaaah. Please don't ever stop doing what you're doing. You give me life.


	7. Monster Under the Bed

Other than the conspicuous absence of his caretaker that forced him to get up and walk with a sick-addled center of gravity, the thing that bothered Sacha the most about this whole deal was that the piano had disappeared from his dreams.

He could live with having to take care of himself. He always had, and the last few days under the gentle hands of the spirit were a miraculous luxury. But he’d gotten so used to the soft music that haunted his sleep every night that waking up without having heard it made him feel uneasy, as if he had done something wrong, and this was his punishment.

He wondered how badly he’d scared the spirit. Spirit, because he couldn’t think of it like a boy, because he didn’t want to imagine how lonely a boy would have been, holed up in this house for so long by himself. 

Even so, he was furious at himself for whatever it was he felt towards the spirit. He was fine now. He was recovered from the sickness. Yes, without the spirit, he would likely be dead, but without Babushka, he’d be dead too, and that didn’t mean he had to like her. 

The point was, it had served its purpose, and now he didn’t need it anymore. It was all the same to him whether it fled the house to die in the snow or found some deep corner to hide in. He didn’t like it, he didn’t need it, and he certainly didn’t want it. That was what he told himself, anyways, and a part of him screamed, “Lies!”

No matter how much he tried to convince himself he was cold, he was heartless, he wasn’t curious and didn’t care about the spirit that saved his life, he still missed the piano in his dreams.

One night he went to bed and dreamt a nightmare.

He was home, but everyone home turned into a monster, so he ran away into the city to beg for help. He found a priest who helped him. He asked the priest, “How will I know who is a monster without seeing them turn?” And the priest said, “There isn’t a way to do that, child. You must wait and see.”

Then all the people in the city turned into a monster, and he was so afraid. He couldn’t run down any of the stairs, so he thought he was going to die, trapped in a city full of monsters he didn’t recognize. But he found one flight of stairs he could run down, and he went down into the tunnels.

He got on a great underground train. It took him far, far away, and somehow he knew that no one on the train was a monster. He got off at the next stop and asked the man who sold tickets where he was, and fell to the ground in relief when it wasn’t the city he’d been in before. 

He needed to go home. He needed to go home, because the tunnel was crumbling around him. Black flecks fell from the ceiling, coppery, like dried blood. The train turned on its side, and no one inside it was a monster, but he knew they were chasing him, they were still coming after him, and he had to get away-

Sacha sat bolt upright in bed and realized he was covered in blood.


	8. Snowfall

Red. It soaked into him, smelling of death and metal. All around him, dried flecks of it littered the bed.

Sacha finally got a handle on himself and bolted out of the room. He immediately got in the shower, not even bothering to take his sleep clothes off, letting the water clean those, too.

He went downstairs, wrapped in a towel, still wearing his wet clothes, and ate. Then he went back upstairs and stood in front of the bedroom door for a good five minutes before he worked up the courage to yank it open.

All the blood was gone.

“What the fuck,” Sacha said.

He knew what he'd seen. Hell, he'd washed it off of him and watched it run down the drain. There had been blood all over that bed; he was sure of it. But for whatever reason, no trace of it remained.

What kind of creepy-ass shit was going on in this house?

He shut the door again and went back downstairs to sit on the couch and figure out what he was going to do with himself.

The cushions were dusty, but that was alright. Sacha had sat on worse. Here in the colonies, all wooden furniture had to be sanded by hand, and only the wealthy had cushions. Sacha’s family did not. It was a common thing to plop down on one of the three chairs they owned and immediately get back up again, due to the splinter that was now sticking out of your ass. What was a little bit of dust compared to surprise pointy objects?

A cloud of the stuff rose up out of the cushion. Sacha coughed and amended his previous thought. What was a choking puff of death and destruction compared to surprise ass-stabbers?

He waved a hand in front of his face to make the dust go away, except it didn’t. It just ended up getting more dust in his face. Sacha coughed again, annoyed, and then realized there was a shit ton of dust in the air, more than was justified by him sitting down on the couch.

Immediately, he told himself not to panic. Sacha knew what to do in the event of a house fire; he’d been in several. One of the key parts of that was to not breathe in any smoke and start choking. In this case, there was no fire, only dust, which made his job a lot easier. The absence of burning piles of stuff on the floor made covering his face with his towel and walking out of the dust cloud a lot less difficult.

The kitchen seemed to be clear. Sacha lowered the cloth from his nose and mouth and shook off the dust accumulated on the fibers. He looked back towards the living room, and lo and behold! There was no longer any dust in the air.

None of this shit made any sense. First the oodles of blood, now attempted death by dissolved dust bunny. What the hell was this house trying to do to him? If it was trying to kill him, it was doing a piss-poor job of that.

Maybe it was trying to scare it off. If so, it obviously didn’t understand Sacha’s motivations. He needed a place to stay for the winter. This was a place. If he went outside, certain death awaited; if he didn’t die of hypothermia, the people hunting him would find him eventually. So the choice was either stay, and put up with all the creepy shit, or leave, and slowly freeze to death under the relentless snow.

Speaking of snow, the first few flakes were beginning to fall from the sky. Sacha went to the kitchen sink to wash the dust off of his face and arms, and when he looked up, he could see the little white flecks drift down to the cold red sands.

It was beautiful.

Sacha supposed snowfalls on Earth were a lot like this: a great blanket of silent white released from the sky, to cover the ground like a quilt of fluffy cold. It was the only thing on Mars like anything on Earth. Sacha savored every single snowfall he could, knowing he was seeing the same sight as the privileged fuckers on earth, that this was one thing he had like them that he didn’t have to work for.

But at the same time, it made him angry. The people on Earth didn’t have to worry about the cold. They had thick quilts and warm woolen sweaters, waterproof coverings to keep the water from melting on your skin and freezing again. They sat behind their insulated windows, sipping cups of hot chocolate, while the people on Mars huddled together in a pile to conserve as much heat as they could.

Snow was both beautiful and terrible. Sacha loved and hated it accordingly. He sat up on the kitchen counter and leaned back against a cabinet, settling in to watch it fall.

Over in the corner, the piano began to play.


	9. Merveille

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one' s short, but important.

He couldn’t believe it at first. The same little lullaby from his dreams, only now he wasn’t dreaming. There was no one at the piano. He knew that before he took even a single step in its direction. But Sacha went to it anyways, because there was no point in ignoring it, because maybe the spirit would let him make amends.

He sat on the edge of the bench and watched the keys depress, tapped by invisible fingers. There was barely any sound at all, on account of how lightly each hammer was pressed to its string, but it lent the melody a sort of peace you couldn’t find in other places.

“Are you angry at me?” Sacha asked the empty air.

Nobody answered him.

“Don’t be,” he said. “I haven’t done anything to you.”

The melody stumbled, and slowly ground to a halt. Sacha got the feeling something was looking at him.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m being chased by some very bad people.” He hoped putting it in the simplest terms possible would help the spirit understand his situation better. “They want me dead, and I don’t have anywhere else to go. Make my life a living hell if you want, but no matter what you do to me, I won’t- I can’t- leave this place. Short of leaving, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll stay the hell away from you if that’s what it has to be. But I think,” and this was a tentative thought mind you, “that it really wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you to talk to me, ya know? I’m not- I’m not a bad person.” Well, there was a blatant lie. “At least, the people who are chasing me don’t want me dead because I did something bad. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and…” Oh, what was he doing, trying to justify himself to a fucking ghost?

What was he even trying to accomplish with this conversation, anyway?

“I just need you to stop trying to kill me,” he finished lamely.

He stared in the direction of where he presumed the ghost to be for a while, even though he was pretty sure he’d felt it leave shortly after he’d stopped talking.

Sacha really hoped that had worked. Never mind the fact he still had no idea what he was trying to do.

On the way upstairs to bed that evening, he noticed that the wall had been written on with red ink. It said:

 

NOT TRYING TO KILL YOU

 

“Well,” said Sacha. “That’s bloody fucking comforting. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”

With a start, he realized that was the truth.


	10. Future

Existential crises had never been his area. Sacha was more accustomed to problems like “Hey, we’ve run out of food for the winter!” or “My sister’s boyfriend is beating her!”

In which case, the solutions would be to either get some extra money for food by blowing his boss, or finding his sister’s boyfriend and beating his face in.

But where he was now, there was no foreman to suck up to, and no idiot to sock, unless he counted his ghostly roommate, who he could not sock, because he could not find him.

He was bored. He had nothing to do, except survive- he didn’t even know if the fucking Mafia was still after him or not. Maybe it would be worth it to nip out for a bit, try and figure out what the hell was going on out there, but he wouldn’t bet his left toenail the ghost wouldn’t try to barricade the house to keep him from coming back. And if he ended up needing it still, well, then he was screwed.

He spat.

An air of disapproval came over the room.

“Sorry,” he muttered, wondering when he’d gotten to be such a pussy that he’d apologize for spitting on the floor. Not even Babushka could make him apologize for that, even though she could make him mop it up.

The air of disapproval dissipated. Sacha was back to moping.

Even if the people chasing him were done, what was he going to do? Assuming he could just waltz back into his little section of the neighborhood, say his hellos and sorry-for-leavings and maybe even get his job back, then what? That was it. Just that, working a dead-end job every day at the furnace, for the rest of his life, until they got tired of him and buried him in the red Mars sand, not quite deep enough to be blood, just like he wasn’t quite pale enough to be considered human.

The Earth people said Mars was uncivilized. _Well, of course it’s uncivilized,_ Sacha thought bitterly. _You packed up and took all your nice things with you, and left us to scratch a living off the sand and whatever scrap wasn’t good enough for your pampered hides._

His family was lucky to have wooden chairs, even ones that stabbed you in the ass unexpectedly. They only had two now, Babushka having sold the rest of them to put them all through the winter, and money for things like laundry soap.

Did he want that? Did he want to go back, support his family until Babushka died, until his sister left him for a boy and he had to hope every day she wasn’t having the shit beat out of her, just like she had with the last three?

Did he have a fucking choice?

He wasn’t destined for great things, not like the children on Earth. On Earth, they said every child was special. On Mars, the only thing special about children was whether they were pretty enough to make a living off their bodies. Some of the rich fucks liked that- skinny little kids barely out of middle school, hollow-cheeked and dead-eyed, on their knees every night to earn their porridge.

If she hadn’t been lucky, if her brother hadn’t gotten that job at the furnace, then Sacha’s sister might have had to do just that. The thought made him shudder. More than that, it made him want to go back, to throw out his spine shoveling shit into that furnace just to keep her out of the clutches of those disgusting bastards.

Bottom line was, Sacha would work for the rest of his life. He’d manage well enough when he was young and strong and pretty enough for blowjobs on the side (because he’d never, ever let anyone fuck him), but then he’d get old, and while the asshole politicians on Earth got wax pumped into their smiles and went on special diets to keep themselves all grinning handsome, he’d waste away, bitter, washed-out and grey. They’d give his job to someone else, someone with a shy smile and soft hair and a clever enough mouth to keep the boss happy, and then where would he be? Dead. He would work until he couldn’t, and then, he would keel over and die, not even a headstone left to remember him. He could already see his obituary, if he even got one: Rest In Peace, Sacha. He was nothing special. No one will miss him.

“You’re sad.”

The voice was quiet, barely anything more than a rasp. Hell, that was it, just a little rasp.

Sacha gave a sharp laugh. “Sad? Bitch, this ain’t sad. This is bitter.”

“Why?”  

He glanced over in the direction of the voice, seeing the spirit, perched on the arm of the couch. The boy’s eyes widened a little as Sacha’s gaze raked over him, but he didn’t run like before.

“Do you know what happens in this shithole?” Sacha asked him. “They use you. Your entire life they use you, and when you ain’t nothing but a sack of skin and bones, they spit you back out again and step on you.”

“Leave.”

“I already told you,” growled Sacha, “I ain’t going nowhere.”

The boy shook his head, and pointed up. Up towards the stars, towards Earth, if it was the right timing.

Sacha snorted. “Not fucking likely, kid.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he snarled, “they charge your firstborn son for those damn tickets, and even if you get to Earth, they treat you like they see you: trash.”

“Still better.”

Sacha was getting angry. “What do you want out of me, kid? Something sappy about ‘following your dreams’ or ‘realizing your full potential’? Don’t you know they don’t teach us that shit in school here? Dreams are for Earth, not Mars.”

“Dreams for ev’rybody,” said the spirit, the light in his eyes completely and utterly convinced.

It was at this moment Sacha’s brain chose to remind him that this was a very young individual, who’d likely been some boy toy of this mansion’s owners before he’d died, and had been trapped here for years untold. Dreams were likely all he had left.

“Okay, fine. Dreams for everybody,” Sacha grudgingly chewed out. “Sunshine and rainbows and ponies in a big field of flowers. Happy now?”

Whatever the spirit was made of seemed to shine brighter. He nodded, looking infinitely more cheerful.

Well. It shouldn’t’ve been, but it was worth it, being a sap, just for that.

He was getting soft.


	11. Once Upon a Time

They’d settled into somewhat of a comfortable routine. Sacha woke up in the morning, stumbled blearily downstairs for breakfast, and caught flashes of the boy around the house as he clambered about straightening shit. His sickness and complacency had made him weak; he needed to get himself back into shape.

 

It became worth it when he found the library.

 

Books were Sacha’s guilty pleasure. When he was little, he’d been given a tattered, dog-eared copy of the Bible, which had probably belonged to his parents. It had been so very hard to understand, so hard he nearly gave up on it, but eventually he made it all the way through without having to look up or ask about a single word. He’d believed in that god so fervently then. Now, he could barely stand the thought of a supernatural being, looking down on his suffering, on the suffering of his family, on the suffering of this whole goddamn city and not doing a single goddamn thing.

 

He wasn’t good for much, but damn if he didn’t know how to _read_.

 

Shoving aside the debris, mostly the gutted remains of several bookshelves and what looked like an end table, Sacha brute-forced his way into the treasure trove of knowledge. He gasped. The room was… it was barely touched, sunlight filtering in through the two-story windows, shining motes of dust swirling within the soft golden beams. A thick layer of grey fuzz covered every exposed surface, much like the bookshelves that covered every spot of wall not taken up by window.

 

The door he’d entered through was on the left side of the room facing inwards towards the library. The library itself was a perfect trapezoid. Along the longest base, where the door was, and partway up the legs, there were bookshelves as tall as the windows, so tall they had ladders the height of stairs attached to them. Directly across from Sacha, past the bookshelves and windows on the legs, was a raised balcony tucked against the shortest base. There were bookshelves tucked up against the wall on the balcony landing and bookshelves against the balcony itself. A massive desk, piled high with tomes and manuscripts and what-have-you, made itself known in the middle of the room, situated atop a luxurious plush rug choked through with dust. Behind it was a grand, soft-looking chair, which reminded Sacha of a throne.

 

He stepped into the massive room. A sort of reverence he’d never before felt coursed through him as he walked to the nearest bookshelf, fingers brushing against the spines of forgotten stories as he looked for something to enjoy.

 

A collection of fairy tales caught his eye. Gently, he slipped it out from between the ranks of its brothers and blew the dust off its cover. Then, because he was afraid to read at the desk, he took it back into the living room and sat on the couch, flipping through the worn pages with the utmost care.

 

He lost himself in the stories for a little while. When he looked up, the spirit was there, looking at him curiously.

 

“What?” he asked him. It. Oh, fuck it, _him_.

 

“What _you_?” the spirit retorted.

 

“Reading,” Sacha grunted.

 

“Read what?”

 

“Fairy tales,” said Sacha, glowering in warning. He needn’t have. The boy coasted forwards, eyes widening, hovering just out of arms reach. He looked like he was trying to take a peek at the book.

 

Sacha snorted. “You wanna see?”

 

The spirit nodded.

 

Well, alright then. Sacha patted the spot beside him. “Come sit.”

 

At first, the boy was hesitant, but he was eventually persuaded to take the seat and read over Sacha’s arm. A few moments later, Sacha was struck by a thought.

 

“Can you… read?” he asked.

 

Very, very slowly, the spirit shook his head.

 

Well. Fuck.

 

He sat for a moment and thought.

 

On one hand, spirit-boy-thing was creepy. On the other hand, spirit-boy-thing had saved his fucking life, and Sacha would be lonely as shit without him. Even if their relationship currently consisted of occasionally catching sight of one another and tersely worded conversations.

 

But, laconic though it may be, Sacha felt like they were building up a small sense of companionship. It was tiny, but it was there, and… he kind of wanted to nurture it.

 

Holy _fuck_ he was such a sap.

 

He cleared his throat.

 

“Um.”

 

The spirit looked at him expectantly.

 

“Do you want me to read to you?” he ground out.

 

It was like he’d breathed new life into the boy. Immediately, the spirit glowed brighter, and a look of such happiness came over his face that Sacha couldn’t resist cracking a tiny smile.

 

The moment he noticed this, he covered it up with a gruff scowl. “Alright then,” he grumbled. “Sit _still_. I can’t focus with you squirming. Which one do you want? Ah, fuck it, we’ll start from the beginning. Once upon a time…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I know I haven't updated this in forever. I'm sorry, but this is just one of those things you really have to be in the right mindset for, and between the actual hell that's been happening in my life and my LOTR parody, I've barely had a moment for poor Deimos. It's really late at night right now and I don't have a beta... but it's been a rough week and I wanted to end it with some adorable. Hope you guys liked it! Please leave feedback and concrit... I could always use the help and encouragement. Thank you kindly.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! I am Quincy Jones#6104 on Discord.


End file.
